There's never been a better time to start your own company, thanks to a bevy of project management systems that help reduce costs. Unfortunately, overabundant options can lead busy entrepreneurs down the wrong rabbit holes. To make sure your new business runs seamlessly, learn how to identify the right management tools.

Accountants spend endless hours looking for ways to save money for their clients. Unfortunately, many fail to recognize some effective ways to cut their own operational costs. By allowing accounting entrepreneurs to offload critical tasks, a virtual assistant can drastically increase productivity and allow professionals to focus on the things that matter most.

It may sound like a good problem to have, but rapid growth can actually capsize a business just as quickly as stagnation. However appealing it may seem, unchecked business expansion is often accompanied by specific liabilities and potential dangers.

Throughout the country, countless businesses face data challenges related to sharing, security, storage and redundancies. Unfortunately, too many are held back by razor-thin budgets and what they perceive as narrow options. With cloud storage, both large and small businesses enjoy practical, cost-effect solutions for data storage and seamless sharing.

Operating agreements detail a limited liability company’s (LLC’s) business and the managerial/financial duties of its members. This vital document memorializes an LLC’s rules and structures. While it may seem like a mere formality, this document is actually the most important structure that an LLC creates, as it originates the unique roles and framework of a business.

The inflow and outflow of cash into and out of a business reflects the health of that operation. That’s why it’s important as a small business owner to be able to read and understand a fundamental financial document called a cash flow statement, or statement of cash flows. This instrument is used to track the flow of working capital into and out of a business during a given accounting period. While the income statement and balance sheet are helpful for understanding the financial standing of your small business, they do not take into account the complexity of cash flow over time. It’s also important to note here that cash flow analysis can result in actionable intelligence that can allow you to make large or small adjustments to day-to-day operations to improve efficiencies or help you better decide when it’s time to bring in investors to help you grow. Cash flow analysis is critical for small businesses and should be evaluated at least quarterly, if not more often.

It's important to keep your existing customers, but your business will quickly stop growing if you don’t reach out to new markets and target new customers. In a perfect world new customers would find you, but unfortunately that isn’t how business works.

Not every startup will succeed. In fact, according to a recent study co-authored by experts at Berkeley and Stanford, 92 percent of startups will fail within the first three years. But plenty of those entrepreneurial ventures might still be around today if they had avoided these top reasons that most startups fail.

Your business has been around for a few years now, so is your original mission statement still relevant? It’s important to assess how your current business model and strategy aligns with the mission statement that you started with. Things change, businesses evolve, and goals are (hopefully) being met. With all of that in mind you might be surprised to realize that it’s about time for a mission statement refresh.

Struggling to figure out how to finance your small business? Consider trying asset-based lending to get the job done. In simplest terms, asset-based loans are just what they sound like—business loans that are based on the tangible physical assets of your small business. This usually means accounts receivable and inventory but can sometimes include less obvious items, such as company vehicles. It’s a pretty simple proposition, but it is important to understand the advantages, challenges and risks of asset-based loans. You are risking your future revenue in order to gain access to more funds today.

Chances are your small business stores a lot of vital information online. Have you taken the right steps to protect this data for you and your customers? Here are some concepts and tools that will help you to protect your small business.